Abstract
This paper investigates and compares the performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) when sensors operate on the principles of cooperative communications. We consider a scenario where the source transmits signals to the destination with the help of L sensors. As the destination has the capacity of processing only U out of these L signals, U strongest signals are selected while the remaining (L - U) signals are suppressed. A preprocessing block similar to channel-shortening (CS) is proposed in this contribution. However, this preprocessing block employs rank-reduction technique instead of CS. This detector operates on the principles of principal components (PC). From our simulations it can be observed that this detector is capable of achieving a similar bit error rate (BER) performance as the full-rank MMSE detector with significantly lower complexity. It outperforms the CS-based detector in terms of BER performance when using fixed amplification factor. However, for variable gain amplification factor a tradeoff between the diversity gain and the receiver complexity can be observed. From the simulations it can be concluded that the BER performance of the PC-based detector when using variable gain amplification factor are better than that of the CS-based detector for lower signal to noise ratio.